There’s in a poptimism on the Durhamrock scene, among the younger bands. Their millennial enthusiasm is welcome, its a dreary time but the shwakats are bringing back shiny happy sounds; Native Other and Crown Lands and also Laughed The Boy in particular. Perhaps all that chrome covers up a darkness but for now we will just dance the blues away with these young rock ’n rollers. We asked Laughed The Boy, Chris Panacci on guitar,bass and vox (brother Sean is on drums) to fill us in on whats so funny about Out of the Blue, their new EP.
"We started out in Taylor's (Taylor Spears) bedroom. I had recently blown out my voice playing a show with Busker Bros. and was taking a step back from singing to let my voice heal. I showed him a few songs I had been working on recently and he started singing them. We ended up recording a ton of material over the next year. Our goal was to write and record anything we wanted and without worrying about playing it live to make the music less restrictive."
"Obviously a lot has changed since then, I ended up getting back to singing, we added my brother Sean (also in Busker Bros.) and my friend Brennan on bass. Taylor was away from the project for a while but mixed our full length album we just finished."
"Our sound has always been pretty all over the place. I never intentionally write to create a particular sound, it depends what kind of mood I'm in, what guitar tone I'm fooling around with and what I think might suit my voice. I think I try to keep a lot of our songs cheerful but mixed with other themes to give them more depth. I think songs like "Indifferent" and "Ice Cream" come off as bright and happy initially but there's definitely some feelings of insecurity and uncertainty in the lyrics and riffs that make up those songs. The album itself is going to be a roller coaster ride of different emotions."
